Thank you to a new subscriber who asked me to write about this week’s card, the 3 of Swords! You can request any card or topic in a reply to this email.

To be honest, I got this kind request a while ago, but I’ve been avoiding writing about this one. 

Three of Swords means sorrow, heartbreak, pain, and suffering. It’s harder to insert a breezy Chardonnay anecdote or a pithy butt joke.

Then I realized my avoidance is exactly part of the card’s message.

Let’s turn toward it together, shall we?

In most depictions of this card, a downpour weeps from a gloomy, cloud-choked sky. In the foreground, three swords stab into a heart. You know, chill.

Many tarot experts ask us to look closer. Consider how the swords haven’t drawn blood (even though you’d expect this to be lethal). While there’s pain, there isn’t obliteration. 

Remember also how tarot’s swords represent our cognitive realm: thoughts and beliefs. You’d expect “sorrow,” the term the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn officially assigned to it, to be in the suit of cups (which are literally about emotions).

But no! There’s a concept that the emotional pain ties directly to our mind’s perspective on what pained us: the hurtful words, the upsetting circumstances, the squabble, the rupture.

I think of these swords as the occupied mind: one stuck in the pain of the past, one worried about pain of the future, and one at the center dwelling on the pain presently. The mind is stuck in sorrow — or, the mind’s stuckness is what underpins the sorrow.

It’s that life involves “dukkha,” which is commonly translated to suffering, unsatisfactoriness, or discontent. We are alive, and dukkha happens. :(

It is hard to turn toward sorrow and our pain. It’s only human to shoo it away while turning toward other tasks or numb it out with scrolling.

But let’s imagine if the depiction on the card happened literally, that you have three gnarly punctures to the ole heart organ. That you were walking around with some swords in a very inconvenient place. There was no way you could ignore that, lest you’re in the cast of Monty Python. 

There’s also no way to pull the swords out abruptly without a huge mess. There’s no way to continue your day. We know that what we resist persists. But you can begin by placing your attention on them: examining the points of entry, being curious about the exact nature of the damage, planning and then taking the actions that allow the healing to begin. You have to look at it in order to have a hope of healing it.

Consider this Thich Nhat Hanh quote:

Threes in the tarot signify transformation. This is the evolution of bringing compassionate awareness to our sorrow and through that we alchemize it — while still holding the pain as it is, raw and a bummer and totally not fair.

I asked my wife, who is also a Dharma practitioner and is a clinical psychologist, about her take on this card. I expected a textbook explanation and CBT protocols. 

Instead, she said it reminded her of her frozen anguish following her father’s death. She was so afraid of the storm of grief that she held it at bay, with every ounce of waking energy spent trying to outrun or outscroll or outwork its gloom. It was heartbreaking to witness her desperately exhausted state.

I remember the shift. She began waking up — regardless of whether she had an upsetting dream — sobbing. 

She was in the downpour in the 3 of Swords. But, it wasn’t fearful. She said to be in the storm was a welcome release after the time spent resisting it. The image of the 3 of Swords, the one that so many fear to see in a tarot reading, was a compassionate balm: the release of the cathartic cry. A sweet grief that signaled a closeness with her experience. She was feeling it to heal it.

This post is not an encouragement to muscle through whatever’s paining you. If anything, 3 of Swords lets you know that if you’re caught in the storm, as we all are at one point, there’s a way through it.

What’s a card you’d like me to write about next? Just name it in a reply to this email — I am a human who reads every one!

Thanks for reading,
Cristina

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